Free to play

Last weekend when I logged into WoW I was greeted with a big friendly button offering me a month of game time in exchange for a bit over 22,000 of my in-game gold. I realised a short moment later that this notice meant that my subscription had run out. Being short on cash at the time, I clicked the button.

WoW is free to play now.

Making 20k gold in a month is “in my sleep” territory, so the question becomes: Do I want more money or more WoW gold?

You could probably make a good case for paying real money for a monthly BoE to raid with, but I don’t care enough about gear that I want to spend real money on it. It makes sense that anyone already interested in spending real money on mounts might be willing to cash in a Token to buy more mounts; though the value proposition probably isn’t quite as good for the fairly common BoE mounts as for the spectacular Blizzard Store mounts.

The introduction of the Token does make a lot more sense of how restrictive the crafting system is this expansion; it’s been hard not to notice that we had a new expansion drop without the game economy experiencing massive inflation. I thought it was weird when they started selling heirloom gear for gold-sink amounts, but it makes perfect sense in the context of a new player “buying” experience and damage bonuses for their leveling character.

It’s a bit interesting that the Token includes a 30%-ish markup on the normal subscription price. The fact that all things considered Blizzard is getting more money on my behalf from the Token process than I would otherwise spend on my subscription is something I feel like I need to note. But it doesn’t stop me.

I’m having an incredible amount of fun in my progression raid currently. After spending all of last Monday’s raid wiping on Heroic Iron Maidens, it was immensely satisfying to finally get it down last night.

I don’t think I’m going to get bored with Mistweaver healing. The channel HoT paradigm is fast and effective and has a flow to it like no other healing class has. I’m still not happy with how clunky the stance changes are and always will be, but they also made our melee healing too weak for progression raiding anyway, so no big deal I just don’t use it.